9 ms·

My advice: Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full

by blagie 4y ago

My advice: Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time. A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume. A year of launching an unsuccessful venture? Running coding classes for the underserved? Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch? That's a lot better, both at the time and in retrospect. Side projects are also a good way to get hired. You meet people. You also learn stuff, and stuff of the type you can't learn in a job. You can also do the equivalent of an acquihire. If you want to work for the world's #1 drubble maker, and you spend 6 months developing a drubble startup, guess who'll come out the most knowledgeable and passionate about drubbles at the interview? And perhaps even bring in some helpful IP? Your back story is "I tried to go it alone; I think I can do a lot more good with the backing of a company."

scarface74 4y ago
This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US doing enterprise development is almost 0. The “story” that has worked for me is that “no I’m not going to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls riding a unicycle on a tightrope. What we can do is talk like adults and we can discuss your real world business problems and see if I can bring my skills and experience to the table to help you solve those problems in exchange for money” I’m not going to spend 40 hours a week working and more time on the side working on a side project.
- itake 4y ago
  Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance. We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services. I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies. But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies. Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later. My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree. My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired. (Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      That's a long story to hide the fact that by refusing to do LeetCode interviews you were not offered a software engineering position. You most likely are an SA, which is a position open even to business degree holders and is barely technical, no wonder you didn't have to LeetCode.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to: - be on pre-sales calls with customers - writing the proposals/statements of work - deal with the decision makers from the customers side - architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side” - do the actual work - lead the user acceptance testing - move on to another project You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well. I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go. BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly. I doubt that you’re going to “out geek” me.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Reversing a binary tree is a reference to a FAANG interview. Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      See my other reply for more context. But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies. By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc. I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on. Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
      - anon7725 4y ago
        Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career. Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
        scarface74 4y ago
        That’s true. But there was nothing stopping us from staying at home and traveling like normal people.
    - itake 4y ago
      I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews. “Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.
- tra3 4y ago
  The intent is to learn and produce and be an able to talk about rather than try to make money.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So if you aren’t “learning and producing” at your day job, what are you doing 40 hours a week?
    - tra3 4y ago
      I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post. I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.
    - enraged_camel 4y ago
      Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).
      - scarface74 4y ago
        My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours. My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on. Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company. I don’t do staff augmentation.
greesil 4y ago
Nope, I need that time to grind leetcode.
- itake 4y ago
  leetcode IS the side project 8)
- eulers_secret 4y ago
  This is exactly what happened to me when I quit. “Now I’ll have time for my projects!!” Instead it’s been “Grokking Algorithms”, “The Competitive Programmers Handbook”, Alex Xu’s “System Design”, and enough leetcode that I’m actually doing more than I did at work. What sucks is that there are still lots of medium problems I cannot do. Hards are right out. Dunno what I’ll do.
  - martythemaniak 4y ago
    Not a widely shared opinion here, but this process will make you a better engineer. Keep at it.
    - carlmr 4y ago
      I see this all the time, "coding interviews suck", "leetcode doesn't test if you're a good coder", but in the end it's better than nothing, and having worked at places without coding interviews there's almost no bottom to people's abilities. So a low, but existing, floor is a good thing.
      - vsareto 4y ago
        The biggest issue IMO is lack of flexibility. Leetcode is a specific format with specific questions, but is not necessarily the work you'll do day-to-day. What would be great is if companies offered multiple formats including leetcode, take home, pair programming, Github review, project review, just talking, etc.
        4y ago
awillen 4y ago
I've taken time off between jobs without taking on any meaningful projects, and I generally haven't found it to be an issue. When I tell recruiters I just wanted time off to relax, they're sometimes skeptical, but hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous." I do apply almost entirely to smaller startups, so that may skew the response vs. what you'd get in the more process-oriented recruiting flows of a larger company. Also it probably helps that my resume has a couple of jobs where I was a very early employee at startups that went on to be extremely successful. I also really like to just be left alone and read books, so it's something I enjoy - I recognize that many folks need the structure of work, and that's fair.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous." This only works if you get to even talk to a hiring manager. Most applications are filtered by automatic systems. Many of those will penalize or discard your application for gaps. The same AI bots we built when we were employed are now being used against us.
  - awillen 4y ago
    True, though I don't think it has anything to do with AI - the filtering mechanisms are much simpler than that. That said, I like early-stage startups, so less of a problem with that kind of thing.
- anon50118810 4y ago
  It's important to quantify how long your time off was for this anecdote to be meaningful. No good employer will bat an eye if you worked at a place for five years then spent three months on a tropical beach. A year spent job searching with no luck like the OP is a different situation altogether.
  - awillen 4y ago
jimmaswell 4y ago
This is a live-to-work attitude. Have some other hobbies and goals, and a year of unemployment will be neither lonely nor depressing. Personally I've gone farther in the work-to-live direction, with an easygoing, "boring" (still fulfilling enough to see some javascript doodad come to life, but not world changing) WFH job I perform well in that supports my homesteading and other hobbies.
- fullstackchris 4y ago
  The author anyway had this mentality: > If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I think this happens to a lot of people. Especially for people who really enjoy the work they do, rather than see it as a necessary evil to put a roof over their head.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  I guess that depends on how much you enjoy your side projects. Over the Christmas holidays, I rooted the vacuum robot, built a workstation from parts, worked on a new compression algorithm, and enhanced my papwrcraft design software... Because that's what I enjoy doing in my free time.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    I work a job to pay for my side projects. If I could just work on those, taking care of the house, etc, and still make a living, I'd be very happy.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    I've gotten back into enjoying tech projects again too. I just try to make sure my life isn't revolving around employment.
rjh29 4y ago
I have a decent amount of savings and a side project I want to do which could potentially earn money. Are you saying if I quit my job and do this for a year or so, it'll fill a hole in my resume and not affect future interviews?
- anon50118810 4y ago
  I would only hope to use that as a substitute for paid employment if you actually incorporate, give yourself a title, put your company on LinkedIn and otherwise treat it like a business. Noodling around on a side project that you might monetize eventually is not a substitute.
  - enraged_camel 4y ago
    No need to incorporate or give yourself a fancy title IMO. "Founder @ sideproject.io" works well enough.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    I disagree. Incorporating, giving yourself a title, and a LinkedIn page are things anyone can do. People who "play business" spend tons of time on this stuff, along with designing company logos, hiring accountants (for their zero revenue business), and lawyers (for NDAs to protect their non-existent idea.) I've seen it first hand. They'll do anything to avoid actual work: building and selling a product.
    - michaelt 4y ago
      I suspect what Anon means is: if you plan to tell people your side project was your job, you should start treating it as your job. I play around with some side projects where I don’t give a shit about user counts or GitHub stars or commercial viability, doing perhaps 4 hours work per week. If I told people this was me at the height of my powers, I’d expect them to be unimpressed.
      - anon50118810 4y ago
harshalizee 4y ago
This is terrible, possibly toxic advice. Software devs are people too. They burn out, take time off to travel, reflect, take care of family, or just down on their luck being unemployed. The only advice I'd consider paramount is to take stock of themselves financially and mentally, to assure themselves that they can take on the chaos and uncertainty that follows. Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard. The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. Else, I'd just assume they were being less than honest. I'd rather someone tell me they spent a year working on themselves, playing video games, hiking, etc.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > This is terrible, possibly toxic advice. There are two sides to every coin. Possibly toxic advice for some, but why should anyone give up platforms or avenues that make them standout from the crowd? OP's suggestion is a perfectly valid piece of advice for anyone who has the energy, time, resources, ability, will, and integrity to keep chopping at a meaningful side project. It is not easy, sure. But I don't think we can say it is toxic, either. > The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. We'd do well to not write this advice off by subjecting it to the most extreme possible treatment?
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    > There are two sides to every coin And there are six sides to every cube. In a world of tortured dichotomies, nobody ever mentions those.
    - undreren 4y ago
      I couldn’t have said it better myself. With three kids, my current side project is my day job, at least if measuring by workload. Taking on more work, voluntarily or not, will be at a significant personal cost for me. I don’t get the constant peddling of hussle porn in SWE circles.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Did you get a job this way? Do you know anyone who got a job this way?
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  Almost every single job I've ever gotten is because of a side project or because I incorporated a small company to legitamise a side-project I was hacking on. Over the years: I built a video capture system for the Commodore Amiga as a neat side project for that lead to me working on Transputers that formed the heart of a non-linear editing system (no interview) The Transputers were really fast, so I wrote some neat 3D demos that ran on the Transputer boards in the Amiga & PC => contract work with SGI (no interview) Wrote a demo for the SGI video capture system to scan a magazine at high resolution => machine vision & robotics that was changing the printing industry (no interview) Wrote a C compiler for an 8-bit micro so I could learn C => leads to writing a C compiler for a 16-bit micro at a company (no interview) Created a "smart home dashboard" for a side-project => leads to writing a mobile app to manage a WiFi router => leads to becoming Lead Firmware Engineer on the project (no interview) I wrote some stuff on the Unity3D forums => game development job offer (no interview) Ran a number of in-person developer meet-ups over the years => various jobs & offers & contract gigs (no interview) Got asked by a friend to teach a class on device driver development at USC, video recorded it, he sent it to his friend at Intel => wind up teaching many, many week long, rocket-science level classes on Linux & Android & device driver development & board bring-up at Intel (no interview) Recorded all of my lectures at Intel, shared them with a friend at Facebook who was trying to get in to device driver development => Which lead to me teaching a couple of classes at Facebook (no interview) Asked to critique a ReactNative class at Facebook due to my other teaching there => Which lead to me consulting/contracting for Facebook for a few years (no interview) Video tape my classes at Facebook, which get shared with people at Microsoft & Apple without my knowledge => end up consulting and teaching at both Microsoft & Apple (no interview) Created a bot for a popular MMORPG coupled with machine vision and some AI techniques => contract job to detect bots in the self-same popular MMORPG (no interview) I created a C# package and published it that done some fancy stuff with random numbers => company hired me to work on their project that used the library (that was an "interesting" interview) I wrote some SONY PlayStation developer tools => leads to getting a job at a game development company creating a PSX game (no interview) Create some tools to theme websites and pull data from a database => accidentally create an adult entertainment empire (no interview) Document how the Gameboy works, write some developer tools, maintain some developer tools => multiple jobs developing Gameboy games (no interview) Port MAME to a bunch of consoles, write emulators as side-projects for other consoles => hired to write emulator of their classic consoles for "big console development company" (no interview) Hacked on some gstreamer code => connection with a guy at a Canadian who says "if you're ever looking to move to Canada..." There's lot of other examples in my career where building a side-project leads to an interview or a straight-up offer.
Jagerbizzle 4y ago
"A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume." A year of unemployment seems significantly less depressing than this statement. What if you were to travel (or hike/explore your local area), focus on quality time with your family, friends, or dog? This to me seems way less depressing than grinding on some meaningless side-project, and as a hiring manager at a FAANG I would absolutely look at a year on someone's CV spent on these activities as a positive rather than a negative.
- geekbird 4y ago
  I've had bouts of unemployment lasting a year and a half. It's really hard to focus on side projects when you are worried about being able to pay the rent and health insurance and your pittance of unemployment insurance has run out. My advice to anyone in the tech field is to try to have a lot of reserves, because tech is cyclical, and layoffs are inevitable, like every two to five years.
rychco 4y ago
I see other comments aggressively criticizing this suggestion (& I'm happy to see it) but I think staying busy with something fulfilling outside of your job is generally good advice. It doesn't need to be resume filler. The constant grindset-mindset is toxic, but staying engaged/fulfilled with something can be tremendously beneficial for your mental health & happiness during a period of setbacks & struggle.
screye 4y ago
The only value of having a knee-jerk 'startup' going is to not appear unemployed. If it's for the optics, then I'd just move the dates of my previous side-projects around and call it a faux-startup. It's not lying. It is work you have previously done as a side-project/school-project at some point. But saying you did it in the last few months helps give the appearance of being continuously employed and not being rusty. SWE interviewing IS a fulltime job. When unemployed, it is especially important to use that time to: [1] Reflect on what job you want for your future & [2] Work on achieving that job. Together, they will take up ALL your time. Tech recruitment wants to have their cake and eat it too. You are expected to have an excellent primary project and have time for the months it takes to Leetcode. It's unrealistic and leads to a period of overwork for candidates. Jugaad is never optimal. But sometimes, Jugaad is necessary.
tayo42 4y ago
> A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume. I'm 4 months into a break from work and the only thing that is depressing is the idea of going back to work. I think if this quote resonates with you, you probably need a break from work and analyze your life.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by blagie 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US doing enterprise development is almost 0. The “story” that has worked for me is that “no I’m not going to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls riding a unicycle on a tightrope. What we can do is talk like adults and we can discuss your real world business problems and see if I can bring my skills and experience to the table to help you solve those problems in exchange for money” I’m not going to spend 40 hours a week working and more time on the side working on a side project.

itake 4y ago
Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).
- scarface74 4y ago
  Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance. We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services. I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies. But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies. Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later. My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree. My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired. (Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    That's a long story to hide the fact that by refusing to do LeetCode interviews you were not offered a software engineering position. You most likely are an SA, which is a position open even to business degree holders and is barely technical, no wonder you didn't have to LeetCode.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to: - be on pre-sales calls with customers - writing the proposals/statements of work - deal with the decision makers from the customers side - architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side” - do the actual work - lead the user acceptance testing - move on to another project You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well. I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go. BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly. I doubt that you’re going to “out geek” me.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Reversing a binary tree is a reference to a FAANG interview. Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    See my other reply for more context. But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies. By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc. I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on. Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
    - anon7725 4y ago
      Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career. Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        That’s true. But there was nothing stopping us from staying at home and traveling like normal people.
  - itake 4y ago
    I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews. “Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.
tra3 4y ago
The intent is to learn and produce and be an able to talk about rather than try to make money.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So if you aren’t “learning and producing” at your day job, what are you doing 40 hours a week?
  - tra3 4y ago
    I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post. I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.
  - enraged_camel 4y ago
    Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).
    - scarface74 4y ago
      My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours. My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on. Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company. I don’t do staff augmentation.

greesil 4y ago

Nope, I need that time to grind leetcode.

itake 4y ago
leetcode IS the side project 8)
eulers_secret 4y ago
This is exactly what happened to me when I quit. “Now I’ll have time for my projects!!” Instead it’s been “Grokking Algorithms”, “The Competitive Programmers Handbook”, Alex Xu’s “System Design”, and enough leetcode that I’m actually doing more than I did at work. What sucks is that there are still lots of medium problems I cannot do. Hards are right out. Dunno what I’ll do.
- martythemaniak 4y ago
  Not a widely shared opinion here, but this process will make you a better engineer. Keep at it.
  - carlmr 4y ago
    I see this all the time, "coding interviews suck", "leetcode doesn't test if you're a good coder", but in the end it's better than nothing, and having worked at places without coding interviews there's almost no bottom to people's abilities. So a low, but existing, floor is a good thing.
    - vsareto 4y ago
      The biggest issue IMO is lack of flexibility. Leetcode is a specific format with specific questions, but is not necessarily the work you'll do day-to-day. What would be great is if companies offered multiple formats including leetcode, take home, pair programming, Github review, project review, just talking, etc.
      - 4y ago

awillen 4y ago

I've taken time off between jobs without taking on any meaningful projects, and I generally haven't found it to be an issue. When I tell recruiters I just wanted time off to relax, they're sometimes skeptical, but hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous." I do apply almost entirely to smaller startups, so that may skew the response vs. what you'd get in the more process-oriented recruiting flows of a larger company. Also it probably helps that my resume has a couple of jobs where I was a very early employee at startups that went on to be extremely successful. I also really like to just be left alone and read books, so it's something I enjoy - I recognize that many folks need the structure of work, and that's fair.

reaperducer 4y ago
hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous." This only works if you get to even talk to a hiring manager. Most applications are filtered by automatic systems. Many of those will penalize or discard your application for gaps. The same AI bots we built when we were employed are now being used against us.
- awillen 4y ago
  True, though I don't think it has anything to do with AI - the filtering mechanisms are much simpler than that. That said, I like early-stage startups, so less of a problem with that kind of thing.
anon50118810 4y ago
It's important to quantify how long your time off was for this anecdote to be meaningful. No good employer will bat an eye if you worked at a place for five years then spent three months on a tropical beach. A year spent job searching with no luck like the OP is a different situation altogether.
- awillen 4y ago

jimmaswell 4y ago

This is a live-to-work attitude. Have some other hobbies and goals, and a year of unemployment will be neither lonely nor depressing. Personally I've gone farther in the work-to-live direction, with an easygoing, "boring" (still fulfilling enough to see some javascript doodad come to life, but not world changing) WFH job I perform well in that supports my homesteading and other hobbies.

fullstackchris 4y ago
The author anyway had this mentality: > If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I think this happens to a lot of people. Especially for people who really enjoy the work they do, rather than see it as a necessary evil to put a roof over their head.
fxtentacle 4y ago
I guess that depends on how much you enjoy your side projects. Over the Christmas holidays, I rooted the vacuum robot, built a workstation from parts, worked on a new compression algorithm, and enhanced my papwrcraft design software... Because that's what I enjoy doing in my free time.
- Aloha 4y ago
  I work a job to pay for my side projects. If I could just work on those, taking care of the house, etc, and still make a living, I'd be very happy.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  I've gotten back into enjoying tech projects again too. I just try to make sure my life isn't revolving around employment.

rjh29 4y ago

I have a decent amount of savings and a side project I want to do which could potentially earn money. Are you saying if I quit my job and do this for a year or so, it'll fill a hole in my resume and not affect future interviews?

anon50118810 4y ago
I would only hope to use that as a substitute for paid employment if you actually incorporate, give yourself a title, put your company on LinkedIn and otherwise treat it like a business. Noodling around on a side project that you might monetize eventually is not a substitute.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  No need to incorporate or give yourself a fancy title IMO. "Founder @ sideproject.io" works well enough.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I disagree. Incorporating, giving yourself a title, and a LinkedIn page are things anyone can do. People who "play business" spend tons of time on this stuff, along with designing company logos, hiring accountants (for their zero revenue business), and lawyers (for NDAs to protect their non-existent idea.) I've seen it first hand. They'll do anything to avoid actual work: building and selling a product.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    I suspect what Anon means is: if you plan to tell people your side project was your job, you should start treating it as your job. I play around with some side projects where I don’t give a shit about user counts or GitHub stars or commercial viability, doing perhaps 4 hours work per week. If I told people this was me at the height of my powers, I’d expect them to be unimpressed.
    - anon50118810 4y ago

harshalizee 4y ago

This is terrible, possibly toxic advice. Software devs are people too. They burn out, take time off to travel, reflect, take care of family, or just down on their luck being unemployed. The only advice I'd consider paramount is to take stock of themselves financially and mentally, to assure themselves that they can take on the chaos and uncertainty that follows. Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard. The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. Else, I'd just assume they were being less than honest. I'd rather someone tell me they spent a year working on themselves, playing video games, hiking, etc.

ignoramous 4y ago
> This is terrible, possibly toxic advice. There are two sides to every coin. Possibly toxic advice for some, but why should anyone give up platforms or avenues that make them standout from the crowd? OP's suggestion is a perfectly valid piece of advice for anyone who has the energy, time, resources, ability, will, and integrity to keep chopping at a meaningful side project. It is not easy, sure. But I don't think we can say it is toxic, either. > The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. We'd do well to not write this advice off by subjecting it to the most extreme possible treatment?
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > There are two sides to every coin And there are six sides to every cube. In a world of tortured dichotomies, nobody ever mentions those.
  - undreren 4y ago
    I couldn’t have said it better myself. With three kids, my current side project is my day job, at least if measuring by workload. Taking on more work, voluntarily or not, will be at a significant personal cost for me. I don’t get the constant peddling of hussle porn in SWE circles.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

Did you get a job this way? Do you know anyone who got a job this way?

justinlloyd 4y ago
Almost every single job I've ever gotten is because of a side project or because I incorporated a small company to legitamise a side-project I was hacking on. Over the years: I built a video capture system for the Commodore Amiga as a neat side project for that lead to me working on Transputers that formed the heart of a non-linear editing system (no interview) The Transputers were really fast, so I wrote some neat 3D demos that ran on the Transputer boards in the Amiga & PC => contract work with SGI (no interview) Wrote a demo for the SGI video capture system to scan a magazine at high resolution => machine vision & robotics that was changing the printing industry (no interview) Wrote a C compiler for an 8-bit micro so I could learn C => leads to writing a C compiler for a 16-bit micro at a company (no interview) Created a "smart home dashboard" for a side-project => leads to writing a mobile app to manage a WiFi router => leads to becoming Lead Firmware Engineer on the project (no interview) I wrote some stuff on the Unity3D forums => game development job offer (no interview) Ran a number of in-person developer meet-ups over the years => various jobs & offers & contract gigs (no interview) Got asked by a friend to teach a class on device driver development at USC, video recorded it, he sent it to his friend at Intel => wind up teaching many, many week long, rocket-science level classes on Linux & Android & device driver development & board bring-up at Intel (no interview) Recorded all of my lectures at Intel, shared them with a friend at Facebook who was trying to get in to device driver development => Which lead to me teaching a couple of classes at Facebook (no interview) Asked to critique a ReactNative class at Facebook due to my other teaching there => Which lead to me consulting/contracting for Facebook for a few years (no interview) Video tape my classes at Facebook, which get shared with people at Microsoft & Apple without my knowledge => end up consulting and teaching at both Microsoft & Apple (no interview) Created a bot for a popular MMORPG coupled with machine vision and some AI techniques => contract job to detect bots in the self-same popular MMORPG (no interview) I created a C# package and published it that done some fancy stuff with random numbers => company hired me to work on their project that used the library (that was an "interesting" interview) I wrote some SONY PlayStation developer tools => leads to getting a job at a game development company creating a PSX game (no interview) Create some tools to theme websites and pull data from a database => accidentally create an adult entertainment empire (no interview) Document how the Gameboy works, write some developer tools, maintain some developer tools => multiple jobs developing Gameboy games (no interview) Port MAME to a bunch of consoles, write emulators as side-projects for other consoles => hired to write emulator of their classic consoles for "big console development company" (no interview) Hacked on some gstreamer code => connection with a guy at a Canadian who says "if you're ever looking to move to Canada..." There's lot of other examples in my career where building a side-project leads to an interview or a straight-up offer.

Jagerbizzle 4y ago

"A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume." A year of unemployment seems significantly less depressing than this statement. What if you were to travel (or hike/explore your local area), focus on quality time with your family, friends, or dog? This to me seems way less depressing than grinding on some meaningless side-project, and as a hiring manager at a FAANG I would absolutely look at a year on someone's CV spent on these activities as a positive rather than a negative.

geekbird 4y ago
I've had bouts of unemployment lasting a year and a half. It's really hard to focus on side projects when you are worried about being able to pay the rent and health insurance and your pittance of unemployment insurance has run out. My advice to anyone in the tech field is to try to have a lot of reserves, because tech is cyclical, and layoffs are inevitable, like every two to five years.

rychco 4y ago

I see other comments aggressively criticizing this suggestion (& I'm happy to see it) but I think staying busy with something fulfilling outside of your job is generally good advice. It doesn't need to be resume filler. The constant grindset-mindset is toxic, but staying engaged/fulfilled with something can be tremendously beneficial for your mental health & happiness during a period of setbacks & struggle.

screye 4y ago

The only value of having a knee-jerk 'startup' going is to not appear unemployed. If it's for the optics, then I'd just move the dates of my previous side-projects around and call it a faux-startup. It's not lying. It is work you have previously done as a side-project/school-project at some point. But saying you did it in the last few months helps give the appearance of being continuously employed and not being rusty. SWE interviewing IS a fulltime job. When unemployed, it is especially important to use that time to: [1] Reflect on what job you want for your future & [2] Work on achieving that job. Together, they will take up ALL your time. Tech recruitment wants to have their cake and eat it too. You are expected to have an excellent primary project and have time for the months it takes to Leetcode. It's unrealistic and leads to a period of overwork for candidates. Jugaad is never optimal. But sometimes, Jugaad is necessary.

tayo42 4y ago

> A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume. I'm 4 months into a break from work and the only thing that is depressing is the idea of going back to work. I think if this quote resonates with you, you probably need a break from work and analyze your life.

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